


The Subject of Ghosts

by Feynite



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Abusive Parents, Abusive Relationships, Ben Hargreeves Needs A Hug, Canonical Character Death, Childhood Trauma, Gen, Protective Ben Hargreeves, Protective Klaus Hargreeves, References to Depression, References to Drugs, Time Travel Fix-It, i think that about covers it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-10
Updated: 2019-11-10
Packaged: 2021-01-26 16:07:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21376822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Feynite/pseuds/Feynite
Summary: Being dead had given Ben a lot of time to think about things.
Relationships: Ben Hargreeves & Klaus Hargreeves
Comments: 24
Kudos: 340





	The Subject of Ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> Technically this is not a complete story in the sense of following an entire plot arc through to completion, it's more a character study with a lead-in to potential time travel hijinks. I highly doubt the actual second season of UA will go in this direction (mostly because they've got a bunch of adult actors who need screen time so the odds of things just ending up in the past with everyone's childhood do-over seem... low), so it might become an AU I eventually expand into a proper narrative at some point. It could also just stay like this, though, especially since my main interests are in another fandom right now.
> 
> I had thoughts about Ben. Somehow he managed to be the most fascinating to me despite hardly being in it. I have not read the comics and have no idea how much of this stuff jives with the show's canon/background material.
> 
> Please enjoy!

Being dead had given Ben a lot of time to think about things.

Most spirits that lingered in the living world started to have… troubles, when they stayed for too long. It was the lack of contact with other things, Ben figured, more than any kind of supernatural deterioration. Unless Klaus was around, he himself couldn’t talk or interact with other dead people. Being a spirit adrift in a world that you could no longer interact with?

Yeah, that had about as many long-term negative effects as you would expect to have on a person. People weren’t made for total isolation.

As near as he’d been able to guess from his own experiences, and also from watching other dead people, after a while most ghosts just became… ‘distilled’, sort of. They fixated on themselves as the only thing left that they could really interact with. Over time certain memories and personality traits started to fall away. Ones that weren’t used a lot when a person was alone, like social skills for instance. Recent memories were clearer than most others, so, it was easy to cling to them, whether the ghost actually wanted to or not. In most cases, those memories were of dying. Usually violently. Because that seemed to up a person’s chances of sticking around for some reason. Fixating on traumatic experiences? Yeah, for the record, also not a good thing for the human psyche. Sooner or later, most people who didn’t manage to move on would lose coherence. Hence the screaming and looking like they still had the injuries from their moment of death and even tormenting the only person who could actually see them.

When Klaus had disappeared with the briefcase, Ben had been left alone to deal with his fears about being an ‘earthbound’ spirit.

It was… jarring. Klaus hadn’t really _ever _disappeared since Ben’s death. Sometimes he couldn’t see or hear Ben, if he was too high and out of it. But he was still _there._ His powers didn’t work as well but Ben didn’t really need them to find Klaus or stick with him; the guy was his brother. Unlike most other ghosts, he had as much reason to haunt Klaus has he to haunt anyone or anything else in the living world.

Once, after a particularly bad night, Klaus had lost sight of him and Ben had lost his own focus, and then he’d blanked and come back to his ghostly senses to find himself in the mansion instead of next to the couch Klaus had been crashing on.

That had been… unnerving.

But Ben had still known where his brother was, roughly, so the challenge had just been in getting back to him. It’d been a matter of drifting through the saturated and blurry fragments of the living world, trying to navigate via the more limited way that he perceived things when he wasn’t around his brother’s powers. He found Klaus passed out where he’d left him, shining like a lighthouse in the murky shores of the afterlife.

He’d never said anything about it. They’d been arguing before and then after it just seemed liable to stir up more trouble.

But the briefcase incident was worse, because for the entire duration Klaus had just been _gone._ There one minute, vanished the next. Impossible to find. Ben had felt completely untethered. Terrified.

He’d ended up back at the mansion before long. Most spirits weren’t good at perceiving places they weren’t already familiar with. When Klaus was around, Ben could see the world as clearly as his brother did - sometimes _more_ clearly, depending on his brother’s level of intoxication. But on his own, he was just a regular ghost. Regular ghosts couldn’t really do shit. Death didn’t care that Ben had powers in life, so, it was almost a relief to end up back ‘home’ again.

Almost.

Even at the mansion, though, Ben was still alone. No Klaus meant no one to talk to. And ‘home’ wasn’t exactly a place full of fond memories. Especially not with the current situation - Hargreeves dead, siblings traumatized and scattered, apocalypse nigh. Klaus had been tortured and Ben had been _right there_ but it wasn’t as if he could do anything. It left him with a lot to brood over. Even knowing how dangerous brooding could be for him, he couldn’t help it. He’d never completely adjusted to his own helplessness in death.

Ben wasn’t really all that bitter about dying itself though. He didn’t _like_ it, obviously. But. He couldn’t say it was necessarily unfair. He’d killed a lot of people. Some of them he could manage to forget about. Some of them were too distant and faceless, or wore masks, or had pulled weapons on his siblings and really made it an ‘us or them’ situation. But others…

Hargreeves never trained his Umbrella Academy to deescalate a situation through non-violent means. Ben read a lot of books. Most of them were fiction. The thing about fiction was that it wasn’t just about ‘the fanciful and ultimately inconsequential’, as his father would say. Fiction often examined concepts of morality, justice, redemption, and autonomy in ways that were more like an especially digestible philosophy class than a ‘pointless romp’.

It was fiction that taught Ben to question what they were doing, long before any of his siblings had seemed to form similar concerns. The library, of course, was stocked to their father’s specifications, but Pogo had always been a voracious reader and Ben’s first forays into books beyond the library had involved ‘stealing’ novels from the family’s beloved butler. _Lord of the Flies _being one of the first, but definitely not the last.

There was a time when Ben would read any fiction he could get his hands on. _Pride and Prejudice, _all four volumes of the translated _Journey to the West,_ one of two translated volumes of _Romance of the Three Kingdoms,_ the collected works of Jules Verne, _A Christmas Carol, _and other classics came hand in hand with cheap comic books, _Nancy Drew_ novels, tie-in series for movies he’d never seen and video games he’d never played, romance and mystery thrillers that Klaus pilfered for him from airport bookstores, and serial sci-fi magazines that Mom got him every year for his birthday under the guise of ‘educational material’. Sometimes they were good, sometimes terrible, sometimes just confusing to a kid who was probably too young for a lot of it. But all of it made him think. And most of it…

Most of it made him think that what he was doing was wrong.

There was a beast inside of him. He was a horror that summoned up monstrous limbs and tore his enemies apart.

According to his books, he was probably the bad guy.

Ben might have been able to shake that off, since it wasn’t as if everything he read decried him. There were plenty of stories about not judging things by appearances, not assuming that just because something _looked_ frightening that it was evil or meant harm. But his own conscience played a role there, too. Because Ben killed people. They all did. It was what they were trained to do. They went in, found the ‘bad guys’, and then eliminated them. There were times when Ben watched as his ‘gift’ slammed another human being around a room like rag doll and saw the fear in that doomed person’s eyes, and knew exactly what he was doing.

Killing.

Most people were terrified when they died. They screamed. They flailed. They emptied their bowels. They didn’t often die cleanly, especially not when they were being mauled by tentacles.

The worst ghosts that haunted Klaus for many years were the ones who had been killed by Ben. His brother only mentioned it once. Slip of the tongue; an early morning where they were all on edge after Hargreeves told Mom not to set a place for Five at the table anymore. Klaus had made a pithy comment about how they could always let the ghost of that guy whose skull Ben had bashed in keep the seat warm for Five, and Ben had felt the floor drop out from underneath him for the second time before breakfast.

By the look on his brother’s face, he knew Klaus regretted saying it the minute he had. Ben had wanted to leave the table. But he couldn’t go until they were excused.

They hadn’t talked about it because of course they never really talked about anything. Klaus just avoided the topic. But after that, Ben started to notice that there was a certain look that would come over his brother sometimes. A flinch, a wince, a way of glancing between empty spaces and Ben - sometimes even a visible discomfort, like he didn’t want Ben to stand too close to certain corners of a room. Like something might be there, _wishing _him harm even if it couldn’t technically hurt him.

It happened a lot. More often than he noticed it happening with Diego or Luther, and the three of them were the big ‘killers’ of the team.

After Ben died he learned that he could fight other ghosts that got too close to him or his brother. Just so long as Klaus was around. It was a mixed blessing and curse. When Klaus dulled his abilities with drugs, it was harder for other dead people to find him. The lighthouse of his presence went dull with his powers and senses. Ben never knew if it was exactly the same for other people, but to him, his brother felt like steady ground surrounded by treacherous, tumultuous waves. However, sometimes things still came - and Ben usually had to deal with them on his own when they did.

At least being dead meant he couldn’t kill anymore, even if it didn’t mean he got to stop fighting. Especially not right after it had happened. Klaus had already been smuggling drugs into the house by then, but when Ben died he got sober to try and see him. Sobriety attracted more spirits than just Ben’s. They couldn’t really hurt Klaus, not physically, but they could and would go after Ben if they felt so inclined.

One of the earliest nights, Klaus had been writing down a list of things that Ben wanted to tell the others. The atmosphere was tense. Hargreeves had approached the situation of ‘Klaus can see Ben’ with the same attitude he had for most things - which was to say, he demanded a report on the particulars for the sake of studying Klaus’ powers, and when asked if he wanted to say anything to his dead son, had asked why he should bother when Ben was ‘no longer relevant’.

Diego had started breaking things. Vanya had cried. Luther had clenched his fists, but not said anything. Allison had stormed out.

Klaus had stared at the ground while Ben stared at his father and wondered what kind of character Reginald Hargreeves would be in a story about their lives.

(He got something of an answer - or at least, one possible version - when Klaus read Vanya’s book out loud for him.)

But after, when all his siblings had been banished, when the house was quiet, Klaus had insisted that the rest of them would want to hear from Ben. He’d insisted it with all the stubborn determination of a brother trying to make _something_ right. So Ben started thinking up things to say. Most of it seemed trite. He wasn’t even sure what to do with his own death. He wanted to tell Luther it wasn’t his fault, but did Luther even blame himself? He couldn’t tell. Number One had always been the hardest for Ben to understand. What if he said ‘don’t blame yourself’ but that just made Luther think he _should_ blame himself and then _start_ doing that…_?_

In the end he decided to just same some generally nice things. If Luther thought Ben blamed him for his death, he wouldn’t expect to hear just nice stuff, right? And then he came up with the idea of recommending some books. Things that he thought his siblings could maybe read to understand what Ben himself had seen in the world and their place in it. Klaus was quiet for a change, just dutifully scribbling down Ben’s stilted efforts at post-mortem will and testament, when the first spirit charged in, screaming.

It was like getting ambushed in a real fight.

Klaus had tried to help, but he couldn’t touch Ben or the other ghost. His cries of alarm summoned Mom first, and then the others, all of them hurrying around the entrance to his small room while Ben struggled with a dead woman whose face he dimly recalled seeing just seconds before he hurled her off a rooftop.

“It’s - it’s, Ben’s here but there are other ghosts and they’re fighting him-!” Klaus had explained, in panicked tones. “What do I do?!”

“If you had applied yourself to your training, Number Four, you would likely be able to banish the intruding spirits,” Ben heard Hargreeves’ voice reply, even though he couldn’t see him.

“How?!” his brother demanded.

Whatever the explanation was, Ben missed it as his opponent started screaming and drowned out everything else. But he doubted it was useful. Their father had a lot of _theories_ with regards to Klaus’ powers, and yet, so far none of them had worked. According to Hargreeves, the fault was with Klaus and his ‘many deficiencies’.

According to Ben, who had also been trained by Hargreeves and had _fucking died,_ their father was in fact not good at teaching anyone to handle powers that had to do more with internal equilibrium than focus or physical skill. So while Ben fought his brother continued to freak out until their father ordered everyone away, and then basically told Klaus to ‘get a handle on the situation’.

Great. Thanks Dad. Supportive as always.

In the end it was_ Ben _who figured out how to banish the aggressive spirit by beating it badly enough that it seemed to become afraid of dying again.

Sometimes Ben wondered - if that incident hadn’t happened, would Klaus have started using again?

Most of the time he figured the answer was probably ‘yes’. Because after Ben had won that fight, and the next one, and the next… there’d been a period of time, there, where Klaus had actually calmed down a little. The ghosts didn’t frighten him as much. They didn’t talk about it, but it didn’t take a genius to put together the idea that Ben fending off the other dead had… maybe given Klaus something he’d sorely lacked before, in dealing with his power. The sense that there was some kind of safeguard. Someone who would chase off the bad, screeching spirits before things could get out of hand.

Unfortunately, Ben couldn’t do much about the ghosts which came to his brother in dreams while he was sleeping, and he didn’t fight the ones which didn’t attack him first. Fighting could take a really long time. Klaus’ power had a wide range of manifestations. Sometimes, Ben wasn’t even sure if it _was_ his power causing him to see some things, or just actual nightmares and trauma from dealing with so many terrible things growing up. Either way, Klaus started experimenting to find the ‘sweet spot’.

Because he knew Ben, and because Ben stuck close to him, there was a point where Klaus could be high enough to not see other ghosts, but still see his brother. Only, the thing about drugs was that eventually, people built up resistances to them. So to reach that same sweet spot again, his brother had to adjust his dosages. Which meant using more, and more, and more…

Ben had tried to talk him out of it. Well, talking to Klaus was basically his number one activity after he died. So he’d attempted a lot of different approaches. He’d tried being frank about it, being nice about it, being angry about it, even begging about it - but while he could sometimes turn Klaus into a guilt-ridden wreck about his life choices, he couldn’t get him to stop. And the goal wasn’t to make his brother feel _worse,_ so… even though he didn’t stop trying, he did switch up his approach to try and focus on other things.

Especially after Klaus left home. Which wasn’t too long after Ben’s death, really.

“It’s not about you,” his brother assured him.

Ben gave him a skeptical look.

“Alright,” Klaus conceded, lighting a cigarette and hitching his bag higher up onto his shoulder. Ignoring the few odd glances he was getting from other pedestrians for seemingly talking to himself. “So it’s maybe not completely unrelated to you. And Five. And the fact that sooner or later, it’s probably going to be another one of us if something doesn’t change soon.”

“You said Five wasn’t dead,” Ben reminded him.

Klaus shrugged.

“Maybe he just doesn’t want to visit me. Maybe he moved on.”

Ben didn’t know what to say to that.

Klaus’ powers weren’t really the kind that could make a lot of money out in the ‘real world’. Well, maybe they could have, actually, if he’d been willing and able to monetize them. A lot of people would probably pay top dollar to get a message from their dead loved ones. There were a lot of hacks in that business, though, and Klaus wasn’t the kind of person who liked to prey on grief. Even if he was the real deal, he also didn’t want to use his powers that much.

Their father’s lessons had trained them to be an obedient team of assassins, but not to really function in the wider world. Leaving was hard on Klaus. Ben found himself keeping track of a lot of aspects of living that most ghosts could forget about, if only because _someone_ needed to remind his brother to try and eat every day, and go to sleep, and do laundry, and make it to whatever job he might be working on time.

“You should move on,” Klaus told him, just once. Lying on a park bench, shivering through a late spring chill, too broke and homeless to find anyplace better to rest.

“I can’t,” Ben said, simply.

He didn’t know how he knew that, but he knew it was true. Klaus or no, whatever it was that let spirits move on to the next layer of existence… he didn’t have it.

His brother let out a long sigh.

“Shit,” he swore.

“Mm,” Ben concurred. “You should sleep. I’ll wake you up if anyone shady turns up.”

A sardonic laugh answered him.

“My knight in shining hoodie,” Klaus praised, but it was bitter and deprecating to both of them.

Ben had to marvel. Even with nothing for either of them to do but talk, somehow, they still struggled to say anything helpful to one another. As the night passed and he kept an eye on his brother, he wondered if their lives would have been any better if they’d been able to trade powers.

Vanya would have given anything to be part of the team, so maybe Ben could have traded with her. He would have been fine with being ordinary. No need to kill anyone, more time to read and avoid training, even feeling left out didn’t seem to hit him as hard as some people. Death had given him plenty of experience with the feeling - enough to know it was bad; enough to know he could handle it, too. Luther and Diego wouldn’t have traded their powers for anything; Diego because he was so good at what he did, and Luther because he rarely went against the order of things.

Most of them would have probably freaked at the idea of Allison and Klaus swapping powers - a Klaus who could pull off mind-control? But thinking about it, Ben decided that could work out, actually. Despite his cavalier attitude, his brother always sobered up when it came to really serious things. Like harm to other people. He wouldn’t have had the nerve to use his powers to do anything despicable, in the end the worse he’d probably do would be ‘I heard a rumour you shut your fat mouth’ or ‘I heard a rumour you wanted to buy me a bagel’. And Allison… Allison was always better at understanding other people and their pain, at trying to mediate, negotiate, charm or command. That would probably be good for dealing with the dead, Ben figured. Even if their father was right, and the problem was Klaus’ fear… Allison was a lot braver too.

As the sun came up he put the idea aside. Not just because it was a fantasy, but because in the end, the problem was never really _them._ It was easy to think in terms of what the seven of them could have done differently to make their father treat them like children and not toy soldiers.

And it was stupid.

They weren’t ever the ones who got to decide how their father treated them.

Trying to make Reginald Hargreeves change would be like trying to reach the moon with Ben’s tentacles. All the flapping and flailing would probably just destroy a lot of things closer to the ground, and leave that untouchable body right where it was.

  
He thought about that again when Klaus managed to summon him into semi-corporeal form. When he killed people for the first time since his own death. Unearthly tentacles slammed into the gunmen before Vanya’s brightly shining sonic powers speared their brothers. He thought about how their father, made of teflon, had left them all flailing. How they’d only hit and hurt one another in all their efforts to strike back at him. He thought about the people he’d killed, and how it had felt when he was dying; how it had felt when Klaus’ head smashed against the floor of the rave, after Ben said Luther would die for him, and Luther only _left him._ He thought about men on the moon and locked vaults with children inside, about Allison trying to reach the sister who had cut her throat, about Vanya dutifully capturing spiders in glass jars so she could let them outside. He thought about the desperation in Five’s gaze, about how their lost brother had tried to do almost everything himself, even though they were supposedly trained to be a team. About Diego, beating Five to the punch on that front as he struck out to try and complete their mission statement, even while insisting he’d abandoned it wholesale.

By the time Ben felt breath fill his thirteen-year-old lungs, felt himself _live_ for the first time in years, he had done a lot of thinking.

Sitting up and fighting the intense strangeness of the moment, he looked down at his own hands.

There was a stunned silence all around as his siblings tried to adjust too. Ben opened and closed his hands, flexed his fingers. Felt the muscles move. _Felt…_ everything. The blades of grass digging into the backs of his knees. The cold air on his neck. The droplets of sweat at his temples. _Breathing._

“I don’t know if going through puberty again is actually better than being dead,” he said, in a voice too high and squeaky for his liking.

Five sets of eyes - minus Vanya, who was still unconscious - snapped up to look at him.

“...Holy _shit,”_ Diego said.

“Ben!” Allison exclaimed.

Klaus let out an incoherent screech and tackled him him so hard that they both fell over again. Ben struggled with the amount of sensation it all brought. It felt like he’d been in a dark room for too long, and everything was suddenly just _so much._ The weight of his brother’s arm around him, the cold and the heat - temperature! Holy shit he’d _forgotten temperature!_ And texture, too! Stiff fabric and softer fabric and slick grass and the skin of Klaus’ cheek, the brush of his hair as he hugged his side.

“What are you getting all worked up for?” Ben asked, trying not to choke as forming the words with an actual mouth and throat - _wet,_ and his own teeth were distracting - nearly undid him. “You just saw me a minute ago.”

“And it has been years since I fucking hugged you, so shut up and accept the love!” Klaus insisted.

The others were still busy staring open-mouthed at him.

“You all saw me a minute ago too,” he reminded them.

And then the sensations got _too_ overwhelming, and he started to hyperventilate.

~

The thing about Luther - in Ben’s estimation - was that he was never actually meant to be a leader.

Leaders had to be able to do two things effectively. One was managing people, and the other was setting (and achieving) goals. In Ben’s opinion, Luther had never been any good at either of those things. The only person he was ever comfortable with was Allison, and out of all of them, Number One had always been the worst at setting his own goals or figuring out things for himself. Four years stranded on the moon doing pointless busywork for Hargreeves hadn’t seemed to help with either his people skills _or_ his autonomy. Shock of all shocks.

But then again, Ben had got to figuring over the years that this was exactly why Luther was in charge of the team. Their father never wanted to put someone with actual leadership skills in charge of the rest of them. What he’d wanted was someone who would act as a proxy for his own goals and rules at the times when he himself couldn’t be around. When he wasn’t inclined to be charitable, Ben could only think of Luther as a kind of parrot - he wasn’t supposed to come up with things on his own. Just follow the patterns that their father had trained into him.

Of course, he also knew that his brother was a human being. That he had his own doubts and struggles and personal ideals. He used to think that at heart, Luther was really just trying to help. That he was the most devoted to the family, the most guilty about Ben’s death - he’d tried to save him, after all. But after the rave, and Vanya…

Ben didn’t know anymore. Maybe, in the end, Luther really was just a selfish asshole, lightly covered with the semblance of a heroic leader. Just enough pretense to float the necessary PR at home and abroad. Ben didn’t know how to reconcile the memory of the brother who’d tried to save him, who’d nearly died as well in the process, with the man who’d left Klaus bludgeoned on the floor; who’d locked Vanya back up in one of their father’s cages, the guy who had forgotten that she was his sister because Allison was something more.

But as the seven of them went through various stages of panic in the estate’s courtyard, thirteen-but-not and alive but still reeling, he knew for sure that no matter what - Luther couldn’t be in charge anymore.

Because Hargreeves couldn’t be in charge anymore. Not even by proxy.

They definitely needed a leader, and Ben was pretty sure they’d all be some level of disaster at it.

Diego and Five were the likeliest to just up and displace Luther out of sheer spite, but in reality, they weren’t any better at being in charge of others than Luther was. Both of them tended to just do things by themselves and only involved others when they literally couldn’t manage without assistance. That wasn’t going to work out this time either. They couldn’t be a team of accessories to Five or Diego’s solo projects. Klaus couldn’t be in charge if for no other reason than that he _wouldn’t_ be in charge; the minute someone else tried to take over, he would just let them.

Vanya was obviously right out. She was still unconscious as the rest of them got their bearings, which was probably a good thing, because once she woke up who the hell could say how it would go?

So that just left Ben himself, and Allison.

As much time as he’d had to reflect on the situation, Ben had been dead for years. Even just sitting on the grass with Klaus clinging to him like a limpet, he knew he wasn’t going to make a smooth transition to being alive again. Not only had he never really been in charge of anything, he’d barely interacted with anyone except for the one fucked up brother for way too long. He couldn’t even _speak_ without feeling gross and disoriented.

Allison, on the other hand, was the only one of them who had ever managed to get her life to a point that could be called ‘functional’. Compared to the rest of them, some questionable use of coercive mind control powers and a messy divorce were _nothing._ Allison had also successfully managed to look after a child - Ben hadn’t even been able to look after _Klaus_ very well.

“I vote we make Allison leader,” Ben said, when there was enough of a lull in the conversation that Five and Luther had started to whisper-fight.

The others all turned to stare at him. By the looks on their faces he could tell that they were going to have a hard time arguing with him. Tragically dead brother just brought back to life, and all. And unlike Five, he had never been an asshole.

Good. Ben wasn’t above using it.

_“What?”_ Diego asked, breaking the surprised silence first.

Ben cleared his throat. God that felt weird.

“Before any of us start this shit up again, since we need someone in charge right now and fuck knows it’s not gonna be Luther, I’m voting we make Allison leader. For now. We all agree to listen to Allison before we do anything stupid. We all run our plans past Allison,” he explained. If this worked then it probably wouldn’t just be ‘for now’, but he threw that in because his siblings were all a bunch of prickly bastards and he didn’t want to start an argument about the long-term situation. Diego looked like he might try it.

Luther looked like he’d just been wounded again.

Ben turned to give Klaus a meaningful glance instead. _Back me up._

“Sounds good to me,” Klaus agreed, flopping an arm in Allison’s direction. “Queen Allison, Leader of the Misfit Time-Traveling Teens-Who-Aren’t.”

“Are we forgetting who the hell actually got us here?” Five protested. “Or who the experienced time traveler is? Who is, in fact, decades older than the rest of you?”

“You’re barely still conscious,” Ben shot back, because that was nicer than pointing out that technically, Five had been in charge of the situation last time. And all he’d done was act like Hargreeves - explain nothing, use people only when needed, and otherwise fuck off by himself a lot.

Five glared.

And swayed.

“...Fuck,” he protested, because honestly he looked seconds away from joining Vanya in an unconscious heap.

“Excuse me, but don’t I get a say in this?” Allison interjected. She folded her arms. For some reason, she seemed the least uncoordinated out of any of them. But then, thinking about it, Ben supposed she’d always been the best at adapting. Pretending. Trying to roll with the punches. That didn’t mean she wasn’t still having some troubles. Just that she was, of course, better at acting normal despite them. Or ‘acting’ in general - she’d made a career of it after all.

It occurred to Ben that, with the time travel and all, his niece no longer existed. And to get her back, Allison would probably have to find a way to hook up with her ex-husband again. Assuming any of this even worked.

It was still better than dying in a fiery apocalypse, but that was probably not… easy to suddenly have to cope with.

“It’s either you or me who has to be in charge at this point, and I’m…” Ben gestured in a way that he hoped indicated how severely out of it he was.

“Hey, what am I, chopped liver?” Diego protested.

“Yes,” he said.

“Fuck you, Ben.”

They squabbled for a little longer, but after a few minutes, Allison cleared her throat and actually got everyone to stop. Ben had to close his eyes and lost track after a while. Because there was light, and at some point he realized he’d hadn’t really seen things so _bright_ in a long time. It wasn’t actually hurting his eyes or anything, but it was making something in his head pound unpleasantly.

Things had barely gone quiet again before a familiar, sharp, authoritative voice rang out.

“What the devil are you all doing out here? This is in violation of several household rules!”

Ben kept his eyes closed.

…Fuck.

~

Following Allison’s lead got them all more or less accepting Hargreeves’ claims of insubordination without much comment in reply, and then heading back inside.

The reasoning was pretty simple - Vanya was still down for the count, and none of them were in fit shape to do much of anything until, at the very least, the disorientation wore off. Only Five wanted to keep moving, and even he had to concede that there wasn’t even a clear goal to head decisively towards yet. The Commission would be looking for them. It was probably a good idea to rest up while they could, and since they Root of the Apocalypse was one of their own, they were bound to play a waiting game for a while anyway.

That didn’t mean that going back into the mansion in their childhood bodies, with Mom and Pogo and their father all still around, was easy. The only grace they managed to gain was that Allison convinced their father that Vanya had just fallen asleep, and that Luther was fine to carry her up to bed.

If there was one good thing about their father, Ben supposed it was that he at least took their bodily needs seriously. They were all fed, all got their requisite hours of sleep, all given medical treatment and banned from anything that might exacerbate injuries or worsen illnesses. Of course, most of that was _directly_ handled by Mom, but at least Hargreeves wasn’t the type of abuser who woke everyone up at two in the morning to smack them around.

Traveling with Klaus, Ben had developed a sort of personal bestiary of domestic monsters. Though it was hard to say that some were really ‘better’ than others, he’d found that there were definitely times when one was easier to _deal with_ than another. Maybe it was personal bias but as someone with the mind of an adult, Hargreeves suddenly seemed like an easy tyrant to manage at the moment.

Technically, the household rules were firmly against room-sharing. Each child had their own room, their own bed, and that was that. Mom would check and if she found anyone breaking that rule then they’d be gently shepherded back to their appropriate places. Sometimes Hargreeves would check too, but usually only when it was Luther and Allison. Ben had just thought his siblings were particularly unlucky in that department. Looking back on it, though, it was probably more that their father was _particularly_ worried about leaving those two specific kids alone together.

Ben honestly hadn’t cared much about it in the past.

After everything that had happened, though, after seeing the full extent of Luther’s double-standards when it came to Allison and the rest of them, it bothered him more.

All of them had been close to one another at varying points in their lives, of course. They grew up together, were pitted against each other, were expected to make teams and work together, to accomplish shared goals but also to compete and compare - it was inevitable that a lot of interpersonal schisms happened. Diego and Luther hadn’t always been at locked horns, for example. When they were much, _much_ smaller, Diego had been Luther’s loyal Second-in-Command; the knight serving his Royal Prince. Allison and Vanya had been more competitive, latching onto their status as the only two girls as something to compete about. Ben, Five, and Klaus were the bookworm trio; Ben and Five by inclination, and Klaus because Luther and Diego thought he was a crybaby and chased him away from their games.

But then Vanya had ‘failed to manifest’ a power, and gone from being the stubborn, demanding one to the shy, uncertain outsider. Allison’s confidence had taken a hit, too, probably some residual effect of confused guilt. Klaus’ powers started getting stronger, which frightened him and made him withdraw for a phase. On the other hand, Five’s growing powers only made _him_ more stubborn and rebellious. The group dynamics shifted, and then shifted again several times over as all of them grew up and their personalities clashed along with their powers. But Ben remembered the first time Luther took Allison’s side, during a fight with Diego and Five.

He couldn’t remember what the fight was actually _about,_ just that it was a turning point for Luther and Allison to become thick as thieves. Not that they hadn’t gotten along before that. It was more like how Ben dying had made his relationship with Klaus a lot more important. It solidified something that was already there.

Even though he hadn’t died, Luther hit a point where he too had sort of become more like the ‘ghost’ of sorts. As they got older he became more focused on being the ‘team leader’ to most of them. He fixated on the role and on himself. Only Allison got to be an exception to any rules; only Allison _really_ got to talk to him.

Ben hadn’t noticed how drastic it had all become until he’d watched Luther lock one sister away in unwanted vengeance for another, though.

Maybe that was what made Luther harder to understand in the end. No matter how anyone wanted to slice it, falling in love with your own sibling was weird. Maybe Luther, for his part, had tried to reconcile it all by breaking away from the notion that they were even siblings to begin with. That they were anything more than just… teammates, all living in the same house, using some convenient terms to identify with one another. ‘Brothers’ and ‘sisters’ only in the same way that cult members might be.

Even though he hadn’t been targeted by any of this specifically, Ben was surprised at how much the notion stung. That Luther would essentially disown them all to reconcile his love for Allison was…

Damn.

He put the thoughts aside, along with the disorientation, as the group of them all trooped up to their bedrooms. The same bedrooms they’d had when they were thirteen. So, mostly sparse, empty rooms with a shocking number of hidden contraband compartments in those floorboards that pulled up so handily. He was hanging onto Klaus. Actually walking in a physical body was a lot trippier than he remembered, and he was afraid he’d fall over before he could get used to it.

Klaus did not object.

Diego glanced at them and then motioned between them.

“So like, were you always pretty much invisibly hanging off of him while you were dead?” he asked.

“Yes,” Klaus lied, swiftly.

“No,” Ben corrected, with a sigh.

“You were! You were almost always there!”

“I wasn’t _literally _attached to you.”

“No but you were spiritually attached to me! Like a leech!”

Ben rolled his eyes.

They were stalling outside the bedroom doors and they all knew it. Allison turned an uncertain gaze towards Vanya.

“If she wakes up alone, it could be… bad…” she ventured.

“So stay with her,” Klaus suggested with a shrug.

“Dad has spy cams everywhere, we’ll get busted for breaking house rules,” Diego reminded him.

“Just break the cameras,” Five suggested. “We’ll get in trouble, but he won’t be able to do anything about it right away. Once we’ve rested and things have calmed down, we can take it from there. We’re not _actually_ thirteen-year-olds.”

“We don’t need to do that,” Luther argued. “Our rooms are right next to one another, and these walls are paper thin. Remember? If anyone gets up, or gets… frightened, we’ll hear about it.”

Allison blew out a hard breath and glanced at Ben. Trying to vote her in charge was the right call; she was taking it seriously. She was also more capable than anyone of getting Luther to back down - not that such power was absolute. And even as a thirteen-year-old, her ‘mom’ voice was impressive as she folded her arms and shook her head.

“No, it’s too much. This is a trip and a half, and… we can’t afford to just leave each other in the dark anymore. I’ll stay with her. Five, break the cameras.”

“Was probably gonna do it anyway,” Five declared magnanimously. He didn’t use his powers. He was much too tired for that. Instead, Ben watched as he headed into the room nearest him - Diego’s - and just uncovered the hidden camera with ease, then chucked it out through the nearby window.

By the time all the cameras were trashed, Hargreeves was, of course, onto them again.

“Number Five! What is the meaning of this!” he bellowed, as he made his way up the stairs.

“Anarchy!” Five shouted back.

There was a pause.

“Anarchy is strictly forbidden!”

Maybe, all in all, it wasn’t so surprising that they ended up reacting the way that they did. Klaus was the first to crack, of course. His voice was still high-pitched and boyish, a little giggly as he snorted and then started to laugh. Ben’s lips twitched upwards. Diego was second, losing a battle against his own nervous giggles. Five’s shoulders shook. Allison covered her mouth, and even Luther did that thing where he looked up and thinned his lips, and got red in the face from trying not to join in.

When Hargreeves came upon all of them laughing like they’d just tried to play an excellent prank, he barked out tomorrow’s laps as punishment and lectured them - again - before finally _ordering_ them to bed.

He watched them dutifully head into their own rooms.

The minute Ben heard his steps finish descending, he opened his door again. He nearly ran into Klaus, and the both of them looked over as Allison came out as well and headed into Vanya’s room; to where Luther had left their youngest sister on her bed. To no one’s surprise, barely a few seconds had passed before Luther emerged.

He glanced at Ben for a minute before he went into Vanya’s room after Allison.

Klaus and Ben looked at one another.

“My room smells like cheap candles,” Klaus said. Which probably actually meant ‘I am deeply uncomfortable being in that space again’. More than any of them, after all, Klaus had bad memories associated with any place where he was shut in and/or forced to sleep. The guy bathed with the _bathroom_ door open whenever possible.

Ben moved a step back and gestured him in.

“Mi casa es su casa,” he offered, relieved that neither of them felt the urge to explain themselves beyond that.

He left the door open. Mom might see if she happened by, but they could deal with that. It was a better option than the alternative.

Ben’s room was a strange place to be in again.

Unlike Five, who was always supposed to come back, when Ben had died their father had converted his bedroom into storage. Pogo had been the one to rescue his belongings first, to make certain that they weren’t just tossed out or shoved into some box where no one would ever find them again. The cold efficiency of it all had bothered Ben more than he’d ever said. He and Klaus hadn’t really talked about it.

So even though he had been to the mansion a fair amount lately, or rather in the future, this was a space that hadn’t remained preserved through the passage time.

The sheets on his bed were neatly made, tucked end corners and dull, beige blankets. The mattress wasn’t remotely big enough for two, but Ben had hoarded pillows a lot at this age. Mostly so he could try and prop himself up comfortably for secretive night reading. There was a flashlight on the bedside table next to a lamp that looked like it had come out of a hotel decor catalogue. In Ben’s floorboard stashes there were rumpled paperbacks, comics, glossy bookmarks with dragons and phoenixes on them, and three bags of M&M’s.

He gave two of the bags to Klaus, who would probably start jumping off the walls if he didn’t get a fix of _some_ kind soon. Sugar was the only thing he was addicted to at this age; at least his body wouldn’t remember or yearn for any bigger high, even if his mind did. Ben kept the third bag for himself. They settled on his bed, cross-legged and side-by-side on the mattress, using the pillows to fend off the cold and the hard surface of the wall at their backs. Klaus inhaled his candy.

Ben ate slowly, mulling over the sensations that had become utterly unfamiliar over the course of being dead.

He’d forgotten a lot, he realized. More than he’d thought. The melt of chocolate on his tongue was so intense that he almost couldn’t take it.

“It’s weird, right?” Klaus said quietly, after a minute.

Ben nodded.

“Is it really different? Being alive again?”

“Uh. _Yeah,”_ he confirmed. Lifting up an M&M, he gave his brother a sidelong look. “Compared to what I’m used to, this feels like I’m putting tiny bombs between my teeth. I think I forgot what it felt like to even _have_ teeth…”

Contemplative silence followed his explanation for several minutes.

Then Klaus patted his shoulder.

“Is the touching okay?” his brother checked. “Fuck. I should have asked that sooner, right?”

Ben shrugged.

“I’ll let you know if it bothers me. It’s not bad so far,” he admitted. The weight was anchoring, actually. Open air on his skin felt strange. Mostly because he _had skin,_ rather than because of the air itself. Klaus let out a relieved breath and then slumped against him again.

“...You’re not gonna be able to see ghosts anymore,” his brother realized.

Reluctantly, Ben had to nod in agreement.

“I’m not trying to guilt-trip you by any means,” Klaus said, as he stared at the wall. “But that part kind of sucks.”

Ben gave him the remainder of his M&M’s. He didn’t really have any other consolation to offer, and he didn’t think Klaus wanted any elaborate reassurance either. Neither of them regretted him being alive again. So they just mulled over this development while the last candy packet crinkled.

Eventually, Klaus fell asleep.

Ben didn’t. Couldn’t.

He’d forgotten how sleeping was supposed to work.

Shit, it felt kind of like he was a really really _really_ young again, in a weird way. Babies didn’t understand their own bodies, right? That was why little kids needed enforced nap times and things, because they’d get tired but not really _understand_ it, not actually recognize what their own body was telling them or what they needed to do about it. Ben remembered being alive but he was rusty at it. He knew he was tired, but the thought of just closing his eyes, letting his consciousness _go…_

He couldn’t do it.

Some ghostly reflex in his mind rebelled, like he was trying to hold his breath but on a mental level. Even when he made the effort to shut his eyes and lean back, it wasn’t working.

So Ben took the time to rest in other ways. He shifted around a little, tried to get more of a feel out for his body again. He’d tried meditating when he was both alive _and_ dead. Hargreeves deemed questions about their ‘genetic heritage’ to be a waste of time, so Ben didn’t even know what culture his mother came from. Even at this age, though, he’d been rifling through any fragments of Asian cultures or religions he could get his hands on. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai - anything to give him _something._ Buddhism was pretty widespread and interesting, so he’d latched onto that early and clumsily. Since Hargreeves wasn’t a big fan of ‘the frivolities of faith’, most of his information came from books. And most of it was rife with _mis_information, too, but there wasn’t a lot of alternatives for Ben. He’d died before he really got old enough to try exploring too many things on his own.

Getting into a lotus position was easy enough at least, and after a while his own breathing stopped tripping him up, too. He settled his thoughts into a familiar pattern of ‘thoughtlessness’, letting them come and go without dwelling on anything. The presence of the monster inside of him was a familiar weight, always itching to cut loose; but he’d had that as a ghost, too. So at least on that front he wasn’t out of practice, even though it had been a long time since he’d felt the physical component of it.

After a while there came a soft tap at his ajar door.

With a glance at Klaus’ resting face - relaxed, no nightmares - Ben got up, and pushed it open further.

Luther peered uncertainly back at him.

“Hey,” he said. “Can we talk?”

Ben glanced at Klaus again. After a pause that was long enough to get awkward, he reluctantly nodded.

“Let him rest,” he decided, with a nod towards his bed. Luther looked a little surprised to see it occupied, but he didn’t comment. Instead he led them back to his own room. Once they were inside, Luther shut the door and stared silently.

Ben waited.

“Well?” he asked, after a minute had gone by.

Luther ducked his head.

“I’m sorry!” his brother blurted. “Ben, I’m just… I just had to say it, I’m so-”

“I never blamed you for what happened.”

Some unknown tension uncoiled from Luther’s shoulders. Like this, in his thirteen-year-old body, he looked ridiculously young. So much smaller, too, although he was still bigger than Ben. His hair was lighter and his uncertainty showed a lot more on his young face.

Of course, he was still also a grown adult inside, and even as an actual thirteen-year-old had been fully capable of flinging several grown men through walls.

“Really?” Luther asked him. And on this topic at least, Ben wasn’t conflicted.

“Really,” he confirmed, leaning back against the door behind him. “It wasn’t your fault. You did your best to try and save me.”

“I did,” Luther swore. “Ben, I… I still want to say I’m sorry.”

“Okay,” he permitted. “Apology accepted, Luther. You’re absolved of your imaginary sin.”

His brother let out a breath. Even looked a little choked up. Ben felt kind of bad, really, that he was still angry; that Luther just hadn’t figured out _what_ he might be angry over. He thought it should be obvious that old news was old news and recent events were what ought to be on the table. But then again, none of the others had ever seemed to really process or accept that where Klaus went, Ben went too.

That what Klaus saw, Ben also saw.

“So we’re good?” Luther made the mistake of asking him.

Ben shook his head.

“Nope,” he replied, popping the ‘p’.

He’d picked up a few habits from Klaus over the years.

Luther looked taken aback.

“But… you said…?”

“Yeah, I’m not mad about _that._ I never blamed you for how I died and I wasn’t mad at you until… prooobably the ‘abandoning our drug addict brother at a rave after he tried to save your ass and got his skull cracked for his trouble’ incident. And then the whole ‘locking our sister in an underground bunker’ bit, too,” he explained.

He could _see_ the exact moment when the penny dropped. When the ‘Ben was there for everything Klaus was there for’ concept finally sank in. It was almost satisfying, except that Ben wasn’t really the vindictive type. He would rather have had nothing to be upset over than to take any kind of satisfaction out of watching Luther get his catharsis snatched away at the last minute.

“...Okay,” Luther said, after a minute. “I… yeah, that wasn’t, I wasn’t myself… after…”

“Luther, I’ve spent the past several years as a ghost following Klaus around. I have a high threshold for watching my brothers do stupid shit,” Ben informed him. “This is different. I wasn’t mad at you when I died, but I am mad at you _now._ And if you just do that thing where you wander off and don’t talk about it again and wait until everyone just kind of forgives it by default, I will not stop being pissed. I’ve been a ghost for years, I’ve learned how to nurse a grudge. The only way you’re getting off the hook is if you actually make amends. Not with me. With Klaus and Vanya.”

Luther paled.

Ben nodded to himself and opened the door to the bedroom again. He nearly tripped on his way out, which ruined the effect of the exit a little. But he recovered, and even closed the door quietly behind himself before he made his way back to his own room.

Of course, he wasn’t actually all that good at holding a grudge. In fact, if anything, being a ghost had made him apt to let things go in order to avoid fixating and becoming a deranged, malevolent poltergeist.

But Luther didn’t need to know that.

Klaus was still sleeping.

Ben grabbed a pillow and sat down next to his bed. As he settled in, he accidentally swallowed some of his own saliva and got caught up in a coughing fit. Which became choking, as his mental wires got crossed and he forgot how breathing worked again.

Klaus woke up a few minutes later to help pitch him forward so his spit would run back into his mouth from his throat, and rubbed his back.

“Shit,” his brother said. “You’re really bad at being alive.”

“So’re you,” Ben fired back, when he could breathe again.

Klaus made a ‘well, yes’ gesture, before slumping back on the bed to try and sleep again. He looked exhausted. Ben felt exhausted too. He sighed as his brother smacked the mattress behind him.

“Come on, we’ll both fit if you spoon me,” Klaus said.

“I’m not spooning you.”

“It’s platonic!”

“I’m still not spooning you.”

“Well I’m strictly Little Spoon material so I don’t think there’s an alternative that would work.”

Ben rolled his eyes and rearranged his pillow on the floor. He lay back.

If you’d asked him yesterday whether or not he’d recognize the look of his ceiling as a child, he’d have probably said no. There wasn’t anything remarkable about it. And yet, he’d spent so many nights in his life staring up at it that - apparently - some part of his brain had just imprinted it. The patterns of faint splotches, the weird rectangle of light created by the window, the singular fixture in the middle of it…

It was familiar.

And that made it feel kinda familiar to close his eyes as well. Count his breaths. He remembered the things he used to think about when he was younger, willing himself to sleep on the night before a mission. Sometimes he’d dream about his Horror crawling out of his skin. Disentangling itself from him and becoming its own thing. Like his own version of befriending the monster under the bed. The Horror, the imaginary one, was always friendly to Ben and his siblings. Well, mostly - sometimes it played pranks on them for him. It went on missions without him, did what needed to be done. It liked ‘saving the day’.

In this fantasy Ben lived without it taking up his whole life.

Like an old and long-forgotten friend, the daydream swept him up and eased him into the antiquated motions of falling asleep.

When he woke up a few hours later, Vanya was standing in front of the open doorway to his room.

She looked at Klaus on his bed. And then she looked back at Ben, lying there with his pillow on the floor. Moonlight on his face. Her throat bobbed. Her eyes looked wet. When she spoke her voice was barely more than a whisper.

“Ben?”

~

For however little his death might have affected Hargreeves, Ben knew it had impacted his siblings.

He knew that they mourned him and missed him. That death had changed their image of him, as it inevitably had to, making him a martyr and glossing over a lot of his flaws and rough patches, turning his image all rose-tinted because he was no longer there to do anything petty or annoying or inconvenient. It was a lot like the statue their father had put up.

But he also hadn’t seen a lot of the process after the fact. Not outside of Klaus’ unique take on death, anyway. After everyone scattered, they hadn’t contacted one another very much. His concept of his siblings’ grief became as abstract as their memories of him.

So he was a little surprised when Vanya just… burst into tears.

It was a lot more visceral than the confused jumble of hugs and exclamations and exhausted, triumphant _shock_ which had coloured their initial arrival in the past, and his subsequent welcome from the others. Vanya was always the sentimental one, he remembered all at once. The one who left out marshmallow sandwiches for Five, and told Mom to pick a birthday so they could celebrate it, and put flowers on Ben’s statue before she left the mansion for good.

She cried quietly. Covering her face as she slid down the side of the door frame, until Ben got up and went to awkwardly try and comfort her. His mind was sleep-fuzzy and his actions felt clumsy, but Vanya didn’t hesitate to bury her face against his chest. There wasn’t even the usual delay of ‘will tentacles come out?’ that had sometimes struck his siblings during hugs, even after he’d managed to get better at controlling that.

“This is a dream,” Vanya said.

“No,” Ben assured her. “Five time travelled with all of us. It’s real.”

Vanya sniffed against his chest. Her shoulders shook.

“I-I-I don’t understand,” she hiccuped. “I did… w-with my violin, I… I hurt everyone…”

Ben sighed. It felt weird. He looked around but there was no rescue in sight. Klaus was still on the bed, either asleep or desperately pretending to be. No one else seemed to have gotten up. Ben’s shirt was soaking through with tears, and Vanya’s presence wasn’t ‘easy’ in the way that Klaus’ was. He’d seen what she could do, and it would be a lie to say that he wasn’t unnerved by it, either.

But she was still his sister.

Ben rubbed the back of her shoulder and gently patted her head.

“Yeah,” he said. “You did. It was not cool.”

A strained, startled sound - not quite a laugh - escaped her.

She clutched his shirtfront tighter.

“How would you know that?” she asked him, sniffing. “It has to be a dream. You died before all of that. Even if Five time travelled, how would _you_ know what I did?”

Ben shrugged.

“I was there,” he said, simply. “With Klaus. I was always there, Vanya. Didn’t you see me fighting off those guys with the guns?”

His sister hesitated. He could almost _feel_ her thinking. Struggling to recall what had happened.

It reminded him of the ghosts who were still hanging on, actually. The ones caught partway between the people they’d been during their lives, and the maddened, lost creatures that isolation and deprivation were turning them into. Cut a human off from the things they needed, and there were always consequences. Parts of human nature that withered, parts of the mind that became ill-used from neglect. Thoughts blurred by pain.

Klaus got like that sometimes too. When his mind took him back to his own cages.

Shit. Ben had death, Klaus had the mausoleum, Vanya had the vault… Five had the future… even Luther had the moon. Maybe the only two of them who hadn’t been cut off and cut apart by that particular kind of imprisonment were Allison and Diego.

Vanya sniffed again.

“I remember,” she admitted. “I thought… I didn’t really recognize you. Or anyone. But… I remember. I’m sorry, Ben. I never would have… I’m sorry, I’m _sorry…”_

“Yeah,” he found himself saying, patting her back. “I know what it’s like to lose control. Remember who you’re talking to?”

His own voice sounded a little distant in his ears. By necessity; this wasn’t a topic he ever broached lightly. They’d all had their struggles with their powers. Apparently even Vanya. But Ben’s losses of control were the worst. Property damaged, people injured, his own body ripped up by the violence of his unrestrained abilities. There’d been a time, a span of a few months, when he couldn’t even be near any of the kids who _weren’t_ Luther. Because if he had a ‘lapse’ he might break their bones.

Vanya looked up at him. Her face was streaked with tears. She looked as young as a kid on all levels, even though he knew the woman inside was an adult. Pain made people smaller.

“I forgot,” she admitted, tentatively. “I forgot you used to be… not so great at control.”

Ben managed a small smile.

“Dad almost put me through surgery, you know,” he confessed.

Vanya looked stunned.

“He wanted to cut you up?” she asked, a little more loudly. Ben glanced over.

Yeah, Klaus was definitely just pretending to be asleep.

Fine by him. This wasn’t anything their brother didn’t already know, and if he wasn’t ready to face Vanya yet, he had some time still. Ben found he didn’t mind taking this task on. Their sister followed the line of his gaze, but thankfully, her only reaction was to lower her voice back to a whisper.

“Really?” she pressed.

“Yeah,” he admitted. “Well… maybe he was just trying to scare me into focusing more. Hard to say. He definitely told me he’d cut them off, though.”

“But… aren’t they alive? Like, a thing that’s part of you?”

Explaining his Horror traits was difficult. It was hard to articulate, hard to convey the right way. Most of his siblings conceptualized it as something that was ‘attached’ to Ben; part of him but not really _him,_ like some giant octopus symbiote that lived in his guts or something. It wasn’t really accurate, but it wasn’t entirely wrong either; and it hit closer to the mark than some other concepts.

So he just nodded in confirmation.

“Dad’s not the best at comprehending powers that depend on emotions a lot,” he said. “Truth is, none of his methods actually worked for me. I only started to make progress when I figured some things out on my own. It’s the same for Klaus, actually. It probably would have been the same for you, but he cut you off first.”

Something flashed in Vanya’s gaze. Angry, silver-white, unfamiliar.

Ben didn’t flinch. He’d seen stranger things.

“He cut me off,” Vanya agreed. “And you all left me out. And it wasn’t even…”

He stayed quiet for a few moments. Letting his sister collect herself, watching the emotions that crossed her face. There were a lot of things he could say, he knew. But Vanya already knew most of them, too. That they were also kids. That they were also subject to their father’s rules and decisions. That it was easy to get consumed by your own demons - sometimes literally - when you were a kid growing up with superpowers. That none of them got exemplary role models in the department of emotional awareness.

What might Vanya _not_ know, though?

“There were times when I used to wish that he’d cut them off,” Ben said.

Vanya paused.

He shrugged.

“If Klaus had actually found a pill that would turn off his powers for good, he’d have never tried any others. You’re thinking along those lines now, right?” he guessed. “You don’t want to keep taking your medication, but part of you is afraid of what will happen with your powers if you stop.”

“I’ll keep taking it,” Vanya said, immediately. It sounded like she was stabbing herself to do it, sounded like Klaus’ voice did whenever he agreed to try and commune voluntarily with the dead. The scenario might have been reversed but the feelings looked pretty much the same.

“It’s your call,” Ben conceded.

“I know,” his sister replied, anxiously. “I know and that’s going to make a big difference, right? Because it’s my choice. So I’m still in control of the situation. I’m not being manipulated, I’m making a responsible decision for my own safety and the safety of the people around me…”

It sounded like she was parroting out something a self-help book might have told her. Or maybe her therapist.

Ben had nothing against therapy. He’d tried to get Klaus to go many times. However, it didn’t take an expert to see that Vanya was just grasping for what she hoped might be the ‘right’ answer. That this was the result of fearing herself, not a mature decision at all.

“If you want to learn how to control it-” he began.

“I can’t,” Vanya cut him off. She shook her head. “I can’t risk it, I _can’t._ Leonard… that, someone tried to help me figure out how to control it, but it just made everything _worse…”_

“Oh come _on.”_

Klaus’ voice interjected abruptly. Vanya startled as their brother rolled over on Ben’s bed and finally sat up.

He looked ridiculous. His hair was sticking up every which-way, as it tended to when there was no gel in it, and his knees insisted on jutting out awkwardly no matter where he put them. There was a long pillow crease across the side of his face.

“Who the fuck was Leonard?” Klaus asked. “The guy Allison talked about, the guy who was trying to get you to _end the world?_ Do you think maybe, just maybe, he might not have actually had the right kind of advice for teaching you to control your powers? Did _he_ even have powers?”

Vanya hesitated, stupidly wide-eyed and small in the face of Klaus’ haphazard confrontation.

“U-uh… he. No, he didn’t,” she conceded.

“Right,” their brother replied. He gestured pointedly at Ben. “Meanwhile, here’s _Ben._ Our brother. Who is alive again! Who not only knows tons of shit about controlling a sickass monster power but, I can assure you, has picked up OODLES of expertise on managing emotional basketcasery from babysitting yours truly. Not to put too fine a point on it, and at the risk of flattering some of his most insufferable habits, but the only reason I didn’t die in a gutter somewhere is because Ben knows his shit. Trust me, he has coached me through _my_ powers and I don’t even want to fucking use them! It’s not a coincidence that the one ghost I managed to make corporeal is him. I mean obviously there’s the brotherly love and close familial connection too but still.”

Klaus blew him a kiss.

Ben looked back at Vanya, who still seemed a little shell-shocked at the sudden and unexpected influx of Klaus into the conversation.

When she turned back towards him he just shrugged.

“I have some ideas,” he admitted. “If you want to give it a try, and put the pills away.”

“He says that _so much,” _Klaus warned her. He flopped back onto the bed. “You know what? I take it back. Don’t listen to him, just do drugs.”

That conclusion was perilously close to the ending of a speech he’d once given a gym full of highschool students after some poor fool had included him on a list of speakers to talk about drug addiction.

Vanya snorted.

Then she let out a long breath. Her eyes were hesitant as she glanced towards Ben.

“...I don’t know,” she admitted.

Ben nodded in understanding.

“I don’t think we have a firm deadline yet, but I also don’t know how much time we have before shit hits the fan again,” he reasoned.

“I predict this morning, when dear old Dad decides to wield his proclaimed punishments and we all skedaddle instead,” Klaus ventured.

“Running away from home might not be much of an option. We all still look thirteen,” Ben pointed out. He didn’t need to elaborate to Klaus on how dangerous being a homeless kid was. For Klaus, it might still have been preferable to leave; but the others had no experience with this kind of stuff. Well, Diego had a little, he suspected. But otherwise, no. And none of them had ever tried to branch out on their own so young. Even if the Commission wasn’t looking for them, an unsupervised gaggle of famous teenagers would not get very far, super powers or not, before people started coming after them.

Vanya fidgeted uncomfortably in place.

“If we stay I might not even get much of a choice,” she murmured. “Dad wants me on my medication.”

“Oh, sweet sister,” Klaus said. “Let me introduce you to the glories of hiding pills under your tongue and spitting them out into toilets. It’s better than using your cheek, ‘cause those suckers can dissolve _fast_ and it’s easier to accidentally swallow when you drink the water too. At least, in my experience. I knew a guy who claimed the opposite but I swear he was part squirrel, he could fit an entire-”

“Klaus.”

“I was going to say pizza sub!”

“I…” Vanya hesitated.

Further down the hall there was the sound of a door opening.

“Vanya?!” Allison hissed, urgent and worried.

Their younger sister stiffened in place, as if she’d just been struck by lightning. Considering the state of things between her and Allison, Ben wasn’t surprised.

“In here,” he called, softly.

He nearly regretted it when Vanya shot him a panicked look. But this encounter was inevitable. Allison hurried into the room and Ben promptly found himself reminded of how small their bedrooms really were - are - as the four children struggled to crowd into the narrow space.

Ben’s sisters looked at one another for a long, awkward moment.

Then Vanya started to cry again.

_“Allison,”_ she said. “Allison, I’m so… I’m _so sorry…”_

Allison’s own eyes teared up. She threw herself at Little Number Seven, hiccuping her own cocktail of relief and distress.

Ben glanced meaningfully at Klaus.

His brother budged over to give him enough room to clamber onto the bed, and let the girls have a little bit of space.

~

“I’m staying on my medication for now.”

“You’re damn right you are.”

Ben breathed in through his nose and out through his teeth, slouching sideways against Klaus as the seven of them crowded the hallway outside of their bedrooms for their ‘emergency meeting’.

It was in the hallway because all of them had no chance of fitting in a single bedroom. There was a security camera on them, but it didn’t have any audio. So far, Hargreeves hadn’t turned up, either, and after Diego had voiced the idea that destroying the camera might summon him more swiftly than just ‘loitering at an inappropriate hour’, they’d decided to leave it be. For now.

Vanya had made her tentative conclusion on handling her powers.

Luther’s response left a lot to be desired.

_“Really?”_ Allison, of all people, asked first, turning towards their Illustrious Number One.

Luther gestured in such a way as to indicate ‘she hurt you’, as if Allison herself was liable to forget.

“This is why Luther can’t be team leader. He cares about precisely _one_ of us,” Ben muttered.

Six sets of eyes turned towards him in surprise. That kept happening. Probably because everyone kept kind of forgetting he wasn’t still dead.

Klaus lifted up a hand. Ben obligingly fist-bumped him, and met Luther’s offended look head on.

“That’s not true!” his eldest brother insisted.

“You know, _thinking_ about it-” Diego began.

“Luther cares about all of us,” Allison interjected, folding her arms. “We all care about each other. Right? At the end of the day, when the chips are down, we _have_ to be in this together.”

She gave Ben a reprimanding look, which, on reflection, he _might_ have deserved. Not for saying anything untrue, but for dragging it out inappropriately. Vanya was nestled uncertainly next to her, betraying the fact that there was still something ‘off’ with her. Technically, her body still should have been on her medication; but the time travel seemed to have messed with a few things. Probably to do with brain chemistry and whatnot.

It actually worried Ben a little, but more because of Klaus than Vanya. Vanya’s powers were wild and hard to control, true, but he kind of thought that a lot of that was because she didn’t have much _emotional_ control right now. 

Addiction changed a person’s brain, though. Even if Klaus’ body didn’t feel like it needed a chemical high in order to keep functioning, some parts of his mind still might be struggling. If that was the case Klaus probably wouldn’t cop to it. Not until he got pushed to anyway. Ben was keeping an eye on him, but that was obvious; they’d been pretty much glued at the hip since they got back.

Eventually, Ben was going to want to enjoy his regained ability to actually go places and do things on his own.

_Eventually._

For the time being, though, neither of them seemed eager to change up what little status quo they could still cleave to.

To Ben’s surprise, it was Five who broke the uncertain silence.

“Allison’s right,” he agreed. “We can’t let our grudges and past mistakes get in the way this time. But, maybe we should… clear the air, I guess?”

At a few uncertain looks, he pushed ahead.

“Dolores never held back on criticizing me,” he explained. “We didn’t have a typical marriage, and we did argue a lot. But it was cathartic sometimes, too. Some stuff, yeah, you just don’t want to bring it up or dwell on it. Others, though… it’s better to lance the wound than let it fester.”

A few glances were exchanged throughout their group.

“...I’m sorry, who’s Dolores?” Vanya asked.

“My wife from the future,” Five explained.

“I thought everyone in the future was dead…”

“They were.”

There was a moment of confused silence. Allison looked concerned.

“She’s a mannequin,” Diego explained, with the nonchalance that came from someone who had already accepted the situation and decided it wasn’t worth kicking up a fuss over. The tone settled across the rest of them, even Vanya, and after a minute, the oddity was set aside in favour of digesting Five’s actual comment.

“Y’know to be honest I think we _should_ clear the air on a few things,” Klaus said. Then he straightened up beside Ben and flopped an arm outwards. “We used to do something like this in rehab. Well one of the places I went to, anyway. Since nobody has time to actually listen to _every_ grievance, why don’t we go around and each of us mentions the one thing that we are the MOST pissed off about.”

“I remember that,” Ben said. “You lied about yours.”

“Well, yeah, I wasn’t about to tell those circle-jerks at the junkie jail anything _true,”_ Klaus replied. “I had a reputation to maintain.”

“I think it’s a good idea,” Allison said, tilting her head in consideration. “If we focus on what we’re most upset about, we can at least probably manage to clear some stuff away. Make the rest of it easier to deal with.”

“I’m sorry, did… did someone say I had a _good_ idea…?” Klaus wondered. He looked five years younger than his already-youthful appearance as he scratched at the side of his head.

“I don’t know, this just seems like it’s going to drag everyone into fights,” Luther reasoned.

“I’m up for it,” Diego countered.

“We’ll vote,” Allison said, before the inevitable fight could ensure. “All in favour?”

Allison raised her own hand. So did Ben. Klaus almost didn’t, being his contradictory self, but Ben raised an eyebrow at him and he huffily complied. Diego put his hand up, and of course, so did Five. Vanya looked like she was still thinking about it, but at that point it didn’t really matter.

Luther sighed.

“Fine,” he agreed, folding his arms. “We’ll go by number then.”

“Okay, that’s probably the best way. You’re first,” Allison agreed.

At that notion their eldest brother hesitated.

“Come on, man, I think we all know what it is already,” Diego quipped.

Luther let out a tremendous sigh and glanced at Vanya.

“The thing I am most angry about is that Vanya almost killed Allison,” he said. “…And that… I spent four years of my life alone on the moon for nothing.”

Vanya ducked her head. No one was surprised, but maybe Klaus and Five were on to something. Hearing it put like that, in Luther’s own words, his agitation didn’t seem quite so high-handed as it usually did.

Diego tapped one of his knives against the floor next to his feet. He’d brought it along as more of a security blanket than any kind of threat. Funny, that was a trait that Ben thought he’d grown out of; maybe he fell back into it. Or maybe it was just more obvious when he wasn’t wearing a holster 24/7.

“The thing I’m most angry about… is Dad,” Diego admitted. “Just… everything he did. How he treated us, how he treated Mom. That he trained us to be heroes but one of _us_ was responsible for the end, and I couldn’t even… save anybody. I’m mad that I w… wasn’t…”

He swallowed.

The word wouldn’t come. None of them fussed over him shrugging instead.

Vanya looked surprised. Probably because she expected to just be dogpiled with this sort of thing.

“Okay, my turn,” Allison said, drawing in a deep breath. After a moment she sighed and shook her head.

“The thing I’m most angry about is that I’ve lost my daughter,” she said. “And maybe it’s more fear and horror than _anger,_ really. But there’s definitely a lot of anger, too. I’m angry because I feel like this didn’t have to happen, and now that it has, I… I’m terrified that I might have lost her forever.”

Her voice broke. Luther reached over but she shook her head at him and covered her mouth with her hand instead.

After a minute had passed, Ben looked at Klaus.

“Oh, right. My turn,” his brother said, sitting up straight once more. “I’m… to be honest, I’m not really angry.”

“Bullshit,” Diego and Five replied at the same time. They glanced awkwardly at one another.

Klaus, though, just spread his hands.

“I know it sounds that way, but I’m not trying to dodge! I just… I feel better than I did before, almost. I mean not about the end of the world, or Allison losing her daughter obviously that _sucks,_ and I’m still in mourning I guess, but… I don’t know how to explain. This body isn’t an addict. I haven’t felt this good, _physically,_ in…since I _was_ this age? And Ben’s alive again. We’ve got a chance at actually fixing things. Even if we fail, it’ll be pretty hard to do worse than we did the first time. So. Yeah, I think I’m… good?”

“It doesn’t have to be on par with everyone else’s anger. Just whatever you’re _most_ angry about,” Ben reminded him, almost verbatim quoting the old group session.

Klaus blew out a breath towards his bangs.

“Fine. Okay. The thing I’m most angry about… is that we’re thirteen again. So even though we’re all healthy and alive and yay that, getting anything done is going to be _impossible._”

That was good enough. Klaus sighed and slumped back again while Five cleared his throat.

“The thing I am most angry about,” he said. “Is the _fucking apocalypse.”_

Vanya shrank in on herself, but Five wasn’t looking at her. He was glaring at the ceiling, and probably god by proxy. Or the moon. Diego nodded in a universal gesture of ‘that’s fair’.

“...Also the headache I’ve had since I carried all of you through time with me, which, _you’re welcome.”_

“Thanks Five,” Ben said.

His brother blinked at him in surprise. His body language managed to convey a sudden rush of awkwardness over the unexpected acknowledgement.

“...It’s fine,” Five replied. “Happy to help, I guess.”

There was a pause. Ben suddenly realized that it was his turn. He was, by far, getting the lion’s share of curious and expectant looks.

Hmm.

What was he _most_ angry about?

His gaze drifted over to Luther. Number One looked like he was bracing himself.

Tough luck, brother. Ben wasn’t an angry person by nature, and while a lot of this situation had him wary, exhilarated, fearful, confused, and a whole lot of other things besides, what he was actually ‘mad’ about stood out pretty clearly.

“The thing I’m most angry about is that I asked Klaus to help Luther when he was having his meltdown after he discovered Dad’s lies about the moon. I told Klaus that Luther would have done anything to help him if their positions were reversed. And it turns out, I was wrong,” he admitted. “I am angry that I was wrong about that.”

Ben looked at his hands. He couldn’t entirely manage to look at Luther while he spoke.

In the silence that followed, a person could have heard a pin drop.

_“What?”_ Allison asked.

“I don’t… Ben, I was really out of it…” Luther said.

“What the _fuck_ did you do?!” Diego demanded, taken aback.

“I-it’s not actually that big of a deal,” Klaus interjected. When Ben glanced at him, his brother was looking at him with wide eyes.

“You died,” Ben argued.

“Only for a little while!”

“What the FUCK did you do?!” Diego repeated, with more emphasis, while Ben found himself staring resolutely at Klaus.

“I didn’t hurt Klaus!” Luther insisted.

“Okay, okay, everyone calm down!” Allison interjected, raising both of her hands. “Clearly, we need a little more clarity on the situation-”

“Luther freaked out after he discovered that Dad was lying to him about the moon mission. He asked Klaus to give him drugs. Klaus said no, so he decided to go find them on his own. We followed him to a rave, where he refused to leave with Klaus and instead tried to give _him_ drugs. While Klaus was trying to _stay sober_. Then, when Luther’s flirting pissed off some of the locals, Klaus stopped them from attacking him. He got his skull cracked on the rave floor. I had to sit with him while his scrawny ass was lying there, **dead**, for several minutes. I couldn’t do anything, because I was a _fucking ghost._ Luther left with some girl who thought he was a furry.”

More silence followed the explanation.

Ben nodded to himself as finally dragged his gaze away from Klaus again.

“Currently, that is what I’m most pissed off about,” he concluded. There were some other contenders, but whether or not it was as fair as Five being mad about the apocalypse or Allison’s anger over losing her daughter again, it was genuinely causing him the most ‘anger’ at the moment. If he didn’t know it was mostly useless, he’d have slugged Luther in the face just to try and alleviate some of the resentment. He was upset about Vanya and those revelations too, but those emotions weren’t as simple as ‘anger’.

Next to him, Klaus looked like he was trying to melt into the carpet.

“Okay it sounds _really bad_ when _you_ say it…” he murmured.

“Vanya’s turn,” Ben reminded everyone.

That seemed to bring them up short again, because however anyone wanted to slice it Vanya’s emotions were kind of a critical component to their future goals. Even if Ben brought something out of left field, it still wasn’t going to be ‘an apocalypse’.

…Probably.

Their youngest sister had stopped hunching, at least. She looked more uncertain after Ben’s admission; but that uncertainty had her leaning towards a strange, unexpected streak of confidence too.

“I’m… can I pass?” she asked.

“Nope,” Diego said.

“Absolutely not,” Five agreed.

“Sorry,” Allison concluded.

Vanya sighed and closed her eyes.

“I know I don’t have the right to act like the wronged party, after… what I did. But… I guess this kind of thing is more about feelings than about comparing or contrasting everyone’s sources of rage? So. What I’m most angry about… what I’m _most_ angry about is that Dad told Allison to use her powers to make me think that I thought I was ‘just ordinary’. And now I don’t know how many of my own feelings of inadequacy are a result of not having my powers, or just not being able to believe in myself because feeling ‘ordinary’ about everything, every passion I could have had or place I could have made for myself, meant that there was nothing _outside_ of my powers to reach for, either.”

It was Ben’s turn to be part of the surprised crowd, then.

Vanya sniffed.

“I’m angry at myself,” she admitted. “I’m angry at all of us for never escaping this cage Dad built around us. I’m angry that I hurt Allison, and that I attacked all of you, and that Luther locked me away. I’m angry that the most validating experience of my life was just… destruction. That _I_ created that situation that Five had to live in, alone, I’m just… I’m so, so angry I don’t know what I’m most angry about but I’m afraid of letting myself feel it because _what if I do it again?”_

When she finished speaking their youngest sister was breathing heavily in agitation.

Eventually it was Five who broke the silence that followed.

“You didn’t,” their brother said.

  
Vanya blinked at him, confused.

“Didn’t…?”

“Create that situation,” he clarified. “The Commission worked to ensure it would happen. You were a component, yes, and I’m not letting you off the hook for anything you actually did. But if you don’t destroy the world, they’ll find something else to do it at the predetermined time. I worked for them, so I know. That’s something we have to keep in mind. It’s not just about Vanya - without Vanya, they’ll find another way to end the world.”

“...Well. Fuck,” Klaus said, summing up most of their internal reactions. Except for Vanya, who looked just the tiniest bit relieved.

It wasn’t exactly the noblest of reactions. But then, if a secret organization had figured out how to use Ben’s lack of control over the powers he was born with to destroy the world, he’d probably take some consolation in knowing _he_ wasn’t the _entire_ problem, too.

“The Commission…?” Vanya asked.

Reminding them all once again of how badly they had left her out of the loop.

Even Ben knew more and he’d been _dead._

In light of Vanya’s general ignorance of most of what had happened - and the gaps in everyone else’s piecemeal knowledge of events, too - the rest of the emergency meeting was dedicated to figuring out what they all actually _knew._ Five took over a lot of the talking, since he had the most comprehensive impression of relevant events, but all of them ended up chiming in and explaining things. Even Vanya shed some light on her own situation, with her powers and that creep who’d manipulated her.

Ben did the least amount of talking. Anything he had to offer, Klaus already knew. And Klaus was used to doing the talking. The only time he chimed in was if he thought some detail or other was being overlooked.

The novelty of talking to people, other people, and having them acknowledge and respond, still hadn’t worn off. But it got kind of exhausting, too. He was glad to fade into the background again for a while.

The group debrief finished when Five checked his watch.

“We’ll be expected at breakfast soon. Mom’s bound to come get us in ten minutes or so,” he said.

Diego straightened up a little.

“We’re not leaving her behind again,” he declared. “If we go, we’re taking her with us.”

“Go?” Luther countered. “Where exactly are we going to go? We’re thirteen. There’s a secret organization hunting us down. I’m not saying we can just stick our heads in the ground but we can’t exactly walk out the door with no problems.”

“Well we can’t stay here,” Diego countered. “You might be fine reliving the ‘glory days’ or whatever but I am sure as shit not doing Dad’s dirty work for him again.”

“Wait a minute,” Five interjected, lifting a hand. “We have to think about this logically. Messing around with time is not a simple process. Actions always have consequences, and the more you change, the more unpredictable the ripple effect tends to be. If we all just _leave,_ then that means that whatever missions Dad _did_ assign you all after I was gone aren’t going to get done. Or they’ll get done in totally different ways, which will probably still have an effect.”

“So what?” Diego demanded, bristling. “Don’t think I don’t see where this is going. Suddenly it’s important that all of us follow history or whatever, but _you_, you weren’t ever here, so guess who’s the logical person to let run around trying to deal with the ‘Commission’ while we all play house-”

“Don’t accuse me, if it’s _actually logical-”_

“Okay, okay, time out,” Allison interjected, making a ‘T’ with her hands. “I think, for the moment, we’re going to have to accept that we can’t follow the script for this ‘timeline’ going forward. I appreciate what you mean, Five, but there’s no way that any of us remember the missions we went on or ways we handled situations well enough to recreate things without changing events anyway. And besides, we didn’t come back in time to _not_ alter the progression of events around us. I mean, if changing things makes the future more unpredictable, doesn’t that work in our favour anyway? Moreso than the Commission’s. Since _they’re_ the ones trying to chart a specific course through history, while _we_ only care about the end result of avoiding the apocalypse. And keeping our family safe.”

Her expression twisted a little at the last point.

Ben found himself nodding in agreement.

“So what do you think we should do?” he asked.

Allison glanced around at all of them and then sighed.

“Nobody’s going to like it,” she warned.

Klaus straightened up like a dog that had just heard an enemy bark.

_“No,”_ he said, pointing an accusatory finger at Allison. “We are _not_ telling Dad!”

“Listen, I know, _I know,”_ Allison insisted. Holy shit, Klaus guessed right. She raised both her hands in a placating fashion. “But we are teenagers. Barely teenagers. We’re children! Without Hargreeves we don’t have access to money, or food, or shelter, and there are a lot of people out there who would target us even without the Commission if we were on our own. Dad has resources, he has connections, and however terrible he has been as a parent, he knows how to plan and enact a mission. And most importantly… he might actually believe us.”

Allison hesitated, then sighed.

“I don’t think anyone else will even entertain the idea that we’ve come back from the future with dire warnings of a secret time-travelling organization.”

There was a moment of pensive quiet, then, as even Diego was forced to mull this prospect over.

After a minute, Klaus cleared his throat.

“I think we should leave anyway,” he said, with a glance at Ben. “I mean, I think if we’re going to change stuff, we should just go whole hog. We don’t want to risk things going the same way twice. We… I don’t think we did much that was worth preserving, anyway, and we lost…”

He trailed off awkwardly, voice squeaking on the last sentence, and then shrugged.

Ben blinked.

“Yeah, I’m not dying again,” he concluded, reading between the lines.

“I wasn’t talking about you, asshole,” Klaus insisted. “Don’t be conceited, I was talking about the whole future.”

Ben raised an eyebrow.

His brother tossed his hands into the air.

“Alright, fine! Yes! I don’t want to stay and do missions for Dad because I don’t want to risk Ben dying on another one.”

Luther cleared his throat.

“I agree.”

Six heads swiveled towards him in astonishment.

“Huh?” Ben blurted, articulately.

Their eldest brother glanced at Allison, and then at him. He drew in a deep breath. One of his resolute, ‘getting ready to try and lead’ types. For some reason, an incredulous corner of Ben’s brain couldn’t help but wonder ‘is he actually gonna pull it off this time?’

“I don’t think we should tell Dad the truth,” Luther said, radioing in from the realms of Backwards Opposite Land, it seemed. Number One glanced at Allison again. “I get what you’re saying, and it makes sense. But we can’t trust Dad to share the right information with us, or prioritize the right things. I spent my whole life trying to give him the benefit of the doubt, and I ended up a half-gorilla doing busy work on the moon. I don’t think we can - or should - just walk out the door and try to _leave,_ but I think we need a plan that doesn’t rely on Reginald Hargreeves.”

“Or Pogo,” Vanya suggested, quietly.

Silence followed this suggestion.

Vanya had killed Pogo.

Ben felt a sharp stab of anger at it. All of them had been close to Pogo in various ways; he was the paternal figure that Hargreeves never managed to be, even though he was hampered by his own limitations and loyalties. Unlike Mom, who was programmed to admire their father, Pogo technically had free will and a mind entirely his own. His admiration for Reginald Hargreeves was genuine.

And complicated. Because there weren’t exactly many places for a talking chimpanzee to find safety and security in the world.

Ben had always had a particular soft spot for Pogo, though. It was the books. Even with his genuine admiration, he knew Pogo rebelled against Hargreeves in his own ways, too. Little, subtle ways, but definite ones as well. He loved them.

For Vanya to have killed him… to _still_ be angry at him, even…

Ben had troubles looking at her.

“Pogo didn’t deserve that,” Diego said, glaring at Vanya. Following the same line of thought as everyone else, it seemed, but suffering none of Ben’s internal conflict at expressing it.

Vanya met his stare for a minute.

Then she faltered and looked down at her hands.

“I know,” she said. “I don’t… I don’t want to hurt him again. That’s not what I mean. I just… don’t think he’ll be able to keep it secret from Dad. That’s where his loyalty is. When it comes down to it, he’ll always take Dad’s side, even if he doesn’t like it or actually agree with him.”

Ben found that he wasn’t sure he believed her on that ‘not wanting to hurt Pogo’ front.

…But she probably wasn’t wrong about this loyalties, either.

Fuck.

Where would that leave them, though?

“...Mom,” Diego said. The rest of them looked at him again. He sounded resolute, looked surprisingly determined as he met all of their stares. “We need Mom.”

“She’s programmed to be loyal to Dad,” Allison reminded him.

“She’s programmed to look after us,” Diego countered. “All we have to do is get rid of Dad, and one mode of programming will outweigh the other. As long as being loyal to him _isn’t an option,_ then it won’t be a conflict.”

“And how are we supposed to get rid of Dad?” Five asked.

  
Diego shrugged.

“I’d think that’d be obvious,” he said.

Ben felt a sinking premonition that he knew where this was going, and that he was about to have a lot of conflicting feelings about it.

“We kill him,” Diego suggested.

Ah.

Yup.

Once again, he was unhappily correct.


End file.
